'The crazy asks are usually the things I gravitate towards'

When actress Cate Blanchett was offered a role in action adventure movie Borderlands, she was massively surprised but says playing bounty hunter Lilith turned out to be so much fun

- LUCY ALLEN

She made her name playing a redhead — and now Australian actress Cate Blanchett is starring as another feisty flame-haired character. But her part as Lilith in the movie version of popular video game Borderlands could not be more different from her award-winning role as the Tudor queen in period drama Elizabeth in 1998.

If you haven’t played Borderlands, the game on which the movie is based is a space Western science fantasy, set on the planet of Pandora. Players try to reach a vault containing unimaginable riches and alien tech before the evil Atlas Corporation gets there first. In the film, Cate plays a mysterious bounty hunter who returns to Pandora to find the missing daughter of arms manufacturer Atlas.

Cate teams up to battle the bad guys with a host of some of Hollywood’s finest, including showbiz royalty Jamie Lee Curtis, comedians Kevin Hart and Bobby Lee, and German boxer and actor Florian Munteanu.

Reprising a video game character on screen sounds like a huge departure for 55-year-old Cate, who’s most famous for balancing serious roles in films such as Carol, Tár, Notes On A Scandal and The Aviator with her work on stage both as an actor and as director of the Sydney Theatre Company. But along the way she’s also notched up more commercial hits including The Lord Of The Rings, Thor: Ragnarok and Ocean’s 8.

So what made her sign on the dotted line for Borderlands? Initially, Cate says that she thought director Eli Roth was “crazy” when he suggested she be in it.

“He was cooking this idea up around the video game, which I didn’t know,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is not a world I’ve seen before.’ And then like a month or two later he called back and said, ‘Would I be in it?’ And I said, ‘Are you crazy?’”